The present invention relates to a system and method for data processing responses to open-ended questions, and, more particularly, to a system and method for providing reproducible dynamically variable coding of open-ended respondent answers to open-ended questions.
Typically, Survey questionnaires, such as used by way of example in surveying consumer response to products, normally contain three basic types of questions, i.e., closed-ended questions, which are questions to which all possible choices are shown so that these responses can be pre-coded for data processing, such as shown in FIG. 3A by way of example; open-ended questions, which are fill in answers whose response is unknown in advance and therefore cannot normally be pre-coded for data processing, such as shown in FIG. 3B by way of example; and hybrid questions which contain both types of possible responses, such as shown in FIG. 3C by way of example. In the prior art, open-ended respondent answers have normally first been processed manually to establish a coding structure that is, unfortunately, not readily reproducible and primarily operator dependent, relying on the operator's interpretative ability to find the best match or match to some guide which normally has to first be developed by partial data sampling of arriving responses which may or may not reflect the type of coding structure needed for the balance of the responses. If the codes then have to be varied, then all of the previously coded responses must be gone back to and re-coded. This procedure is quite time consuming and does not optimize the advantages of employing data processing. In an effort to overcome this, there have been prior art attempts at simple FIND systems which merely display the responses for coding, but do not employ any type of computer aided decision in arriving at the coding. This is so despite the increasing use of artificial intelligence in general, such as in prior art language analysis systems, such as shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,731,021; 4,635,199; 4,586,160; 4,703,425; and 4,594,686. Moreover, none of these prior art systems known to applicants is capable of providing open-ended question response analysis and processing to provide reproducible categorized dynamically variable coding of respondent answers. These disadvantages of the prior art are overcome by the present invention.